With Grand Theft Auto 6 looming as possibly the biggest entertainment launch ever, everything Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick says about AI gets parsed like scripture. On the company's latest earnings call — the Q2 fiscal 2027 edition, per Eurogamer — an investor asked the inevitable question: what does AI mean for how Take-Two makes games? Zelnick's answer, reported by GamesRadar+ and Eurogamer, was a careful two-step: yes, the tools help; no, they won't make your hit for you.

What he actually said

Zelnick opened with "Look, technology benefits us," and built from there, per GamesRadar+: "We've always created our entertainment inside computers, with technology. All advances have benefited us, and I don't expect that that will change. In fact, I hope it'll accelerate."

He acknowledged that recent advances have made asset creation dramatically easier than when he entered the industry — while, as GamesRadar+ noted, carefully attributing that to "recent technological advances" rather than naming AI outright. The kicker came when he drew his line:

"But you know what's not easier? Making a big hit. Making a big hit was hard then, it's hard now, and it's going to be hard in the future. And hit creation remains the purview of human beings."

That's Zelnick on the call, via GamesRadar+.

Strauss Zelnick portrait
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, the executive steering GTA 6's publisher through the AI question. Photo: Christopher Michel / CC BY 2.0

Who's who

Zelnick has run Take-Two — parent of Rockstar Games (GTA, Red Dead Redemption) and 2K (NBA 2K, Borderlands, Civilization) — since 2011, and he's one of the few top games executives who regularly fields Wall Street's AI questions directly. The context matters: Take-Two is funding GTA 6's enormous development while investors probe whether AI could compress costs across the industry.

Reading between the lines

GamesRadar+'s Jordan Gerblick was openly unimpressed by the substance, writing that the answer "sounds like a re-wording of what every other C-suite executive has said about AI in game dev" and calling it possibly "the highest ratio of words to meaning" he'd seen. Fair — but the consistency is itself the story. Zelnick has held this exact position through two years of AI hype cycles: embrace the tooling, protect the credit line for human creativity.

For developers, that framing cuts both ways. "AI makes development easier" is the sentence that precedes efficiency drives at plenty of studios; "hits remain the purview of human beings" is the sentence that keeps creative teams in the building. Both can be true at the same company.

What's next

Take-Two's answer to the AI question ultimately ships inside its games. GTA 6 — built the expensive, human way over more than a decade — will be the most-watched test in the industry's history of whether the hit-making formula Zelnick describes still pays off at scale.